Tangential Points:

Brian, your claim that modern psychological theories regarding the subjectivity and consciousness stands in the same position vis-a-vis Freud's ideas regarding subjectivity and consciousness as let's say modern thermodynamics vis-a-vis phlogiston theory is ridiculous and simply false. I think you are seriously exaggerating the scientific (read, mathematical and experimental) rigor of psychology.

Secondly, by Freud's "initial" idea, I meant his basic or fundamental insight, since English is my third language, I sometimes make mistakes like that effecting my meaning. I have read the majority of Freud's works as an mateur (with some interest I might add), and let me ask this simple question: Did you do the same, or are you just repeating some "consensus" in your field regarding Freud (about which I really do not care much)?

Thirdly, I think I agree with your point that Matt is being a bit inconsistent. But I am having a hard time putting my finger on it. It seems to me that he does not see any meaning in life, yet he somehow "wants" it to have meaning (I mean not only for him personally, but, somehow, for everyone). Maybe I am wrong.

Cheers

He's doing quite a bit more than that. It's where he takes those conclusions (which are not important) that we're having trouble with. You can't declare green is meaningless, then go on to say it's terrible and shouldn't have little yellow and blue babies.

I was defining it in normal terms to help you out.

When we are discussing "objective" things, we are discussing things that are factual in nature. "That rock is larger than that rock," "this chicken sandwich was cooked to 165 degrees F."

Subjective things are opinions. "I found it unpleasant when you hit me with that rock," "mmm, that chicken sandwich is tasty."

It is factual that you have subjective notions about the world. Or, rather, I know it is factual that I have subjective notions about the world and I presume that you also do.

I presume that the survivalship bias has something to do with the nature of what appear to factually be large fast moving objects and what appear to factually be dead things that got in the way of the fast moving objects. I'm going to do my best to make sure I don't test the theory too directly, but various ungulates and avarian creatures have tested the various vehicles I believe I have owned and there seems to be a pretty strong correlation between "getting hit by what BTM2 believes is a car" and "ewwwww."

There are rational answers to practical subjective problems, which are the only ones that seem to exist. I think most half-way intelligent people would agree to that.

"I like chicken sandwiches and am unsure how to obtain one."
"Ok, they have those at this restaurant."
"But why do I like chicken sandwiches? It seems arbitrary to me that I don't want a steaming hot bowl of feces."
"JFC."

What he is stuck on is the third and fourth line.

"Why do we exist?"

"**** happens."

"What is the meaning of life?"

"There is none."

"Isn't that bad?"

"Do you want a chicken sandwich or not?!?"

"Do you think I like chicken sandwiches because of evolution?"

"I guess. Seems a likely explanation. Dung beetles like poop from what I understand."

"Why don't I like poop? It seems arbitrary and I definitely don't remember signing up for the 'doesn't like poop' life that I am currently living."

"Who cares? Do you wish you liked poop or something? You are really starting to creep me out."

"But it isn't fair! It is arbitrary and I've had liked to have had the opportunity to have picked my preferences."

"Really?!? That doesn't make any sense. You were gifted your preferences. Aren't you happy you don't have to eat poop?!?"

Say you put a perfectly whole sandwich in a fridge that you share with somebody. You go somewhere, you return, you open the fridge and your sandwich has been bitten into. Did your subjectivity bite your sandwich (or was it somebody that you share a fridge with)?

SMP is all about tangential points.

His theory doesn't work. That is sufficient vigor.

I'm not denigrating him in saying that. We expect that theories get disproven.

I read most his major works auf Deutsche when I was in graduate school.

His basic insight (translated into modern understanding and leaving out where he was completely incorrect) was that crazy people don't understand (and are unaware of) their own motivations and have conflicting motivations that confuse them.

He very strongly believed that understanding one's motivations was completely possible.

The inconsistency is the same as someone saying that a dozen eggs has no value and then complaining about the cost of eggs.

There is no value is the same as dividing by zero. It is undefined; meaningless. He is making the mistake of thinking that he can peg the value at zero.

If I did not share my subjectivity with any other (via language essentially), there would be no way for me to come up with any coherent explanation for the bitten sandwich. None, whatsoever. Luckily, this is not a hypothetical situation: A schizophrenic (which is basically a person imprisoned to a large degree in his subjectivity) might think that spacemen descended to his room, stole his sandwich, replicated it for their evil purposes, took the original one and left the new one in the fridge after biting it.

The only reason why we would not share his opinion on the fate of the bitten sandwich (which would be like a fantasy or dream to us) is because we found a way of sharing our equally subjective dreams (which we call "objective world") because of our common "language". We might come up with a roughly similar answer (i.e. my roommate probably ate it), but if we would be asked to come up with a strict answer (Why did the roommate eat it? How did he eat it, With what hand hand? etc.) our shared dream would collapse and we would come back to the only reality that we will ever know of: the reality of our mind and our subjectivity, and come up with varying answers.

Cheers

Yeah, I do not share Freud's slightly embarrassing, archaic positivism and his rather naive belief in the prospects for a scientific quest for human motivations. But I have to accept that I rather enjoy Jacques Lacan's and Slavoj Zizek's recent attempts to make Freud relevant again by returning to his works but by reading them slightly differently than Freud's original intention. In any case, my interest is obviously rather amateurish.

Your point regarding Matt's confusion of the "categorical absence" of meaning in life (i.e it cannot be "defined" in a rational way, and hence as a category it does not exist) with the conclusion that therefore it does not simply exist (i.e its value is zero even for particular persons) makes sense to me.

Why do we crave for collective (i.e shared) meanings anyway? If life would have a mathematically demonstrable "meaning," I think the most human response to it would be to kick that meaning in the ass and not pay any attention to it anyway.

Cheers

A schizophrenic might think that a spaceman ate his sandwich, but this isn't an instance of someone theorizing that subjectivity literally eats sandwiches, this is just an alternative belief about some other non-subjective entity eating his lunch. Let's say I grant you that our subjectivity creates the "objects" of our experience, do you think that subjectivity literally creates the causal interactions between these objects as well, or that it somehow makes them appear with ~Planck length precision?

Here is a quite close to literal example of subjectivity eating your sandwich. You have a dream that you put a perfectly whole sandwich in a fridge that you share with someone else. In your dream, you go somewhere, you return, you open the fridge and you notice that the sandwich has been bitten into. You dream the proposition 'my roommate ate my sandwich', but alas that's false, your brain rendered a bitten sandwich with no discernible causal connection to the nature of sandwiches or to your roommate taking liberties with your food. Is this what you think fully conscious subjectivity is like?

Pretty much the opposite I think. The more questions we can ask and answer about the event, the clearer it becomes that the existence of an external world is a more elegant explanation for why the objects of our experience change than thinking our subjectivity is solely responsible.

They are both psychoanalysts (aka, they believe in Freud's theories). You would expect them to have a Freudian background.

I imagine it is because we are social animals. We need to find commonality in order to survive. We need to know how others will react to us if we do A vs. B.

A parallel would asking "why do we crave food anyway?"

"All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves."
/thread

addendum- love is the answer

postscript- your ego is your enemy, possessions are anchors, be excellent to each other....

I'd like to get Matt's view on the below, because the rest of his philosophy doesn't hold given the below is true:

Although we currently know that we do not know, does not mean that in the future we will not know. Our present state of knowledge does not imply our future state of knowledge.

To say "everything is futile" is to say that "I know that we will NEVER know", and you can not know that.

Who said anything about 'ignoring the misery'?

Being more appreciative of the life society has afforded you is not mutually exclusive to wanting to improve the world.

Yes, and to explain these apparently surprising findings, research also shows that circumstances - be it money, possessions or standard of living - can only predict up to 20% (at the most) of a person's long-term happiness.

Happiness comes from within, from changing one's perspective, not from the outside. The outside serves as a reference to how well your perspective is doing, and the better your perspective, the better the circumstances around you begin to be.

Our societies are still largely operating under the 2000 year old erroneous assumption that the outside is more predictive of the inside, when its almost entirely the other way around.

Me asking of you to be more appreciative is a suggestion merely for the sake of balancing out your perspective a little more. Your mind will continue to be drawn to philosophies that reinforce the perspective that you hold (as with everyone). Once this perspective changes, as do the myriad of philosophies and ideas that your mind begins to absorb and identify with.

Why would we care about what society afforded us or why would we want to improve the world (post 87) when happiness comes from within (post 88)?

By caring about what society has afforded us, our perspective is able to be better balanced (as opposed to the default perspective which focuses on the negative). Once our perspective is better balanced, happiness will emerge naturally, and by helping others we improve on this happiness by contributing to our own sense of self-worth.

I'm being a nit here but if being afforded something by society is not where happiness comes from, then caring about what you have been given by society seems like extending the mistake (the mistake of misidentifying where happiness comes from).

You're not necessarily caring about 'specific products or services' society has afforded you. You're more being grateful for the position that you're in. A position where the 20% that is predicted by the external world is entirely in your favor (in comparison to those in third-world countries).

Also, becoming grateful for the position that you're in is predominantly an internal process (all the external things you previously weren't grateful about remain the same, the only thing that changes is that you internally become grateful of them) so I fail to see how that misidentifies where happiness comes from.

May occur internally, but must be brought about externally. If I was operating in some sort of bubble or echo chamber, how would I ever know to entertain certain thoughts, let alone allow them to shape me? The only thing "internal" that is of significance...well...genome, connectome (neural makeup) are way too complicated for me to say "the only thing", but, in the "eternal" nature/nurture calculus debate, I still have to err on the side of ever-changing nurture. For being worth massively more than 50%...and the sorts of organisms (ourselves) that result are really not generalizable. Too complicated to attempt to simplify

--There are many levels of knowledge and degrees of certainty. Everything can be futile (and is futile, I argue) even if "we" (some "we" of the species, or something resembling the species, or exclusively artificial intelligence, or some other post-human biologically evolved species (good luck to us for getting to that point)) somehow arrive at "absolute" knowledge. Understanding everything still has no bearing on why it's meaningful to understand everything.

--101 billion-ish **** sapiens have died already. For every one Ted Williams preserved cryogenically, there are approximately 100,999,999,999 not so preserved (yeah, ok, there might be a select few others--concede my rhetorical point, please). How does one attempt to reconcile their meaningless (given that meaning could not have been known in their lifetime, given your argument that "we do not yet know" (with the implication we can eventually know)) and permanent deaths with the potential future discovery of meaning?

(this is a separate and inferior argument from the one presented in the prior paragraph)

Lol, Ted Williams' cryogenic preservation may not be what I remembered it to be:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nati...ticle-1.381985

Edit to say that's an interesting article that would almost certainly appeal to the likes of Ligotti. See below:

"In 2003, The News reported that Buzz Hamon, the ballplayer's close friend and former director of the Ted Williams Museum in Hernando, Fla., sneaked into Alcor with the help of a mortician friend.

Hamon said he was 'appalled' by the conditions there, where Williams' body and more than 50 others were stored in steel tanks alongside cardboard boxes and junk. Hamon died in 2004, reportedly committing suicide.

Johnson writes that holes were drilled in Williams' severed head for the insertion of microphones, then frozen in liquid nitrogen while Alcor employees recorded the sounds of Williams' brain cracking 16 times as temperatures dropped to -321 degrees Fahrenheit.

Johnson writes that the head was balanced on an empty can of Bumble Bee tuna to keep it from sticking to the bottom of its case.

Johnson describes watching as another Alcor employee removed Williams' head from the freezer with a stick, and tried to dislodge the tuna can by swinging at it with a monkey wrench.

The technician, no .406 hitter like the baseball legend, missed the can with several swings of the wrench and smacked Williams' head directly, spraying 'tiny pieces of frozen head' around the room."

conspiracy against the human race indeed..."best case scenario" is above (yes, only for now, pragmatically, but once again, rhetorical point)

Having 'absolute knowledge' is impossible due to the law of uncertainty, but having knowledge regarding the meaning to your life or the reason life exists in the first place is theoretically possible, at some point in the future. To deny this possibility is to argue that 'I know that we will NEVER know', which you can not know.

That last sentence "understanding everything still has no bearing on why it's meaningful to understand everything" is kind of like saying "understanding whether you're alive or not has no bearing on why its meaningful to understand whether you're alive or not". The sentence means nothing outside of context and is akin to common religious arguments for the existence of God. When one does not assume God's existence, terms like 'absolute' lose all meaning, so desiring this standard is equivalent to desiring the existence of God.

These are not the same. The latter is eminently possible; the former is impossible (except for efforts to define it (COMPLETELY, or as close to as possible) naturalistically, which may be successful, but would in the process strip ourselves of all illusory-but-crucial aspects of what we refer to as our humanity...if you are able to completely define say the mechanisms which underlie confirmation bias, or empathy, or whatever else is kinda crucial and unique to the typical human experience, then what are you left with?)

I didn't mean to imply that they are the same thing, and the only reason you don't believe the former is possible is because you believe that it should be (although its not) possible to define things in their absolute.

Having absolute knowledge is in some sense(s) possible. Mathematically, given an axiom. That's absolute...relative to the axiom we assume or postulate.

Having absolute knowledge in an "absolute" sense is impossible, yes.

So, if you consider uncertainty to be a law, which at this point it is quantum-wise, then why can you state with such certainty that I cannot know that we will never know? What would lead you to think we could eventually overturn the "law" of uncertainty?

Perhaps it could be overturned, I do not know. Perhaps we will discover a God or a creator and 'absolutes' will come back into fashion. They are all possibilities. Nihilism and its assured arrogance in believing that 'we will never know' is not compatible with this truth because although it acknowledges uncertainty, it simultaneously demands a standard of certainty that is impossible without the assumption of God's existence. This is why the philosophy is self-defeating.